Ace Attorney Investigations Collection PS4 Review. It’s been said time and time again that Capcom is absolutely on a golden streak right now. From their blockbuster franchises like Resident Evil and Monster Hunter to their commitment to nurturing unique and smaller franchises, Capcom is seemingly on a rampage with their quality releases.
And while it might have been over seven years since the first fully new Ace Attorney game, this franchise is no exception. Ace Attorney has been nurtured and reborn on modern platforms – with this duology marking the landmark of every game in the franchise finally being officially localised outside of Japan. And while these two games aren’t quite my favourites in the franchise, that does little to diminish the quality of this collection, being in line with the other recent compilations from Capcom.
The Investigations games add some great depth to one of the series’ fan-favourite characters and fill out some areas that I’m absolutely sure will be treats for players who have been playing these games over the years.
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection Review (PS5) – Breaking Out of The Courtroom
A New Perspective
If there’s one consistency across the bonkers world of Ace Attorney, it’s that you’re always playing the role of a lawyer. You’re given a defendant to look after and prove innocent, meeting oddballs along the way as you unfurl a logic-defying yet satisfying mystery across a number of episodes. Ace Attorney Investigations and its sequel prove to be the biggest change in this formula since the very beginning, where the titular ‘investigations’ take the forefront.
Compared to the standard visual novel perspective, Ace Attorney Investigations 1 and 2 almost take the form of a point-and-click adventure game, where you actually control Edgeworth as you search for clues in your environment. Functionally, it plays out very similarly to the other games in the series, but this distinction is welcome when considering how this puts Edgeworth into focus.
Capcom wants you to know that you’re playing as the fan-favourite prosecutor, and they want to let players relish in it.
While the story of these two games is no doubt important to the overall storyline – and serves as a nice closure for the original trilogy of games – there is a sense of fan service throughout the runtime. Moreso than other Ace Attorney games, there is a wealth of returning characters from the original titles. It’s also the last time chronologically that we see characters like Dick Gumshoe and Franziska Von Karma in significant roles, so there’s a bittersweet element to the story as you move through both.
That isn’t to say anything about the catalogue of new characters introduced in this entry. Particularly, Kay Faraday. She is to Edgeworth what Maya is to Phoenix. They share a wonderful dynamic throughout the two games and complement each other brilliantly. I won’t ever get tired of Gumshoe, but I found that Kay cut through the sometimes aloof Edgeworth for some great comedic moments.
Still Contradiction Hunting
Despite the framing of the story being slightly different from Phoenix’s courtroom adventures, the core of Ace Attorney remains here and is as strong as always. Relatively self-contained episodes each offer a mystery to be solved, and characters to meet, as well as a case to unravel. The contradiction hunting and testimony inspecting from the main series is intact here if blended together into a more flowing whole.
There aren’t any distinctions between testimony and investigation, things move in a far more dynamic way that lends the feel of something more intense as you often see events actively unfold before you rather than happening offscreen.
This sense of dynamism is also present in the more logic-based puzzle-solving found in these particular entries. Investigations 1 tasks players with linking findings around a scene to each other in order to piece together a picture of what exactly has gone on. You find a half-eaten biscuit in one part of the room, and you find a trail of crumbs leading to another room – piece these two together and you’ve got an idea of someone stealing a biscuit! (This isn’t an in-game example, you’ll be dealing with a bit worse than a biscuit robber).
Investigations 2: Prosecutor’s Gambit ups the ante and adds some time pressure to the mix – in a rare first for the Ace Attorney franchise at large. Most games in the series let you puzzle out things in your own time, but Logic Chess changes the approach to be more about disarming an unruly witness rather than slowly breaking down their defence. This type of gameplay perfectly reflects the seasoned professional that you’re controlling and could only really be designed for a character like Edgeworth, even down to the chess motif.
While I never found these parts of the game to be massively challenging, they are a very good and gentle method of making sure that you actually comprehend the cases that you’re solving and the relevance of the information that you’re uncovering. This is something that modern entries of the franchise are brilliant at doing and it’s great to see where this habit began.
In some later parts of Ace Attorney, I find that I can genuinely just become a bit befuddled by the leaps in logic and this steady buildup of understanding meant that I was far less inclined to resort to trial and erroring my way through particular problems – which is a vice that I’m sure more than a few players are guilty of. No, Ace Attorney Investigations gives you all the tools you need to thrive in these cases and makes it feel like an almost power fantasy.
Living Up To A Legacy
Like every collection preceding this one, the Investigations Collection offers some impressive visual upgrades that frankly staggered me as I went through both games. With the renewed focus on a third-person adventure rather than a first-person one, most characters actually possess nearly double the typical sprites of a traditional Ace Attorney game.
In the original release on the Nintendo DS, these “chibi” character models were pixelated approximations of the close-up animations found in dialogue but was still a massively impressive feat with some serious attention to detail. Fans will be pleased to know that these pixelated models are joined by completely redrawn sprite work for both close-up dialogues as well as the overworld animations, creating a great cohesion between both plains.
In general, I found the redrawn art to be pretty solid across the board. I didn’t find that it quite reached the heights of the redrawn work in Apollo Justice, but I feel like that’s more down to style than actual quality of work. The characters have a slightly odd proportion to them, which makes them look almost like bobbleheads in certain scenarios. I never found this to be a problem – but I did notice that there was a certain odd look to a few characters.
This is helped by the option to seamlessly swap between these new sprites and the old sprites to your preference. No pixel-smoothing here – these original sprites are exactly as they were on the DS, and also have an impact on certain environmental details! I always appreciate this option in remasters and it stands as a testament to the care that Capcom has put into this duology.
Dialogue portraits are fully remastered to the same quality of the other collections in the series, with the original details and animations all brought back in clear detail – so I feel like there’ll be slightly less discourse around these than the overworld ones.
A Complete Court Record
Following in the footsteps of The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles and the Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney Trilogy, this duology contains a suite of quality-of-life improvements and extras for players to sink their teeth into during their experience. Returning from the other remastered collections is the introduction of “Story Mode” – a mode that allows you to sit back and let the game basically solve itself.
As a visual novel series – I can totally appreciate this option as one that allows players to experience the story and twists without having to get too involved. There’s a limited amount of accessibility that can be offered in a genre that essentially offers a single route through and where progression is largely down to the player’s comprehension so this inclusion is good.
Outside of accessibility, the returning gallery feature from the previous two collections offers a bounty of exciting new development materials that have never appeared publicly before and are a treat to investigate. This ranges from the concept sheets for new characters, to animation galleries for characters that you’ve met across both games. These are unlocked as you progress through the game, lessening the chance of spoilers (which the game very kindly warns you of before you even enter the gallery for the first time!).
You can instantly flip between modern art and pixel art to compare just how extensive the work into this remaster really is, as well as see their animations in isolation at any time you like. For a series with such a distinct style, having these on demand is a great benefit and will be a treat for fans of particular characters.
The one downside to these extensive inclusions is that it makes the original Ace Attorney trilogy feel massively bare in comparison; while I wouldn’t say that this pair of games has managed to dethrone my favourite games in the series, I was massively surprised by how much I enjoyed what I thought was a simple side-story. Edgeworth is a fan favourite for a reason and this pair of games highlights the very best of his character – in one last blaze of glory before he was left to the wayside by modern Ace Attorney.
Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is due out on September 6, 2024 for PS4, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Review code kindly provided by publisher.